Photometric Stereo

Abstract

Over the past two decades, we have seen tremendous theoretical advances in photometric methods for 3-D modeling, where we wish to reconstruct the scene geometry from observed images under varying lighting conditions. These advances now motivate us to more prac-tical applications in industry, or even in our daily life. This tutorial is a focused, vertical introduction to photometric stereo. We begin with the traditional Lambertian photometric stereo and see how it generalizes so as to work under more realistic assumptions, such as non-Lambertian cases, unknown lightings. We also discuss active research topics and future works in this domain.